Design Matters

Design matters so much so that I’m agonizing as to what my webtext should look like. I have a complex rhetorical situation that I need to attend to. My design needs to rhetorically function in a number of ways: (1) it needs to help achieve my goals and purpose in the article (content wise); (2) it needs to capitalize on the affordances offered within the design itself; and (3) it needs to reflect me, as a scholar and as a teacher, and somehow needs to connect to my other work out there (like my personal website). Yet I’m restricted in what the design can look like because I’m working in wordpress. Nothing is exactly what I envision as being perfect for addressing my rhetorical issues. So for now, I’m working in a template that kind of does so, but I will later be on the hunt for something that is near perfect.

While I’m faced with these challenges today, I did find solace in reflecting on all of the multimodal work I’ve created in the past. Somehow, last night, in the frenzy of it all, I forgot about the many, many websites I’ve created for my courses as well as my personal website (which I created from scratch). And these documents, I tell you, are not in any way low-stakes. So I find solace in that realization.

I got this.

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